discovered that there’s a fossil layer at 26,000 feet, and it’s taken 45–50 million years for it to get from the ocean floor to 26,000 feet. So I made a little painting of the North Face and put that fossil in it. It’s called From the Ocean Floor to the Roof of the World 45–50 Million Years. There again, people will be able to look at that and say, good grief, I didn’t know there was a fossil layer on Everest that’s come from the ocean floor. I mean, it’s just such an extraordinary idea, and so the geological paintings demonstrate something which has taken an unimaginable length of time to do. GB | That’s pretty dramatic. TF | Biological time is things like the age of trees. And that goes from ancient bristlecone pines all the way through to The Year in the Life of a Cornish Hedge, where I put a little frame around a particular bit of Cornish hedge and simply went back and painted whatever was inside the frame four times: spring, summer, autumn, winter. You’ve been to Cornwall, you know that the hedges in Cornwall are, in the spring, absolutely abundant with wildflowers and the most exquisite things. Those are the biological changes that happen in a year. The next section is human time. And part of that is a section about Darwin and how he changed the way most Europeans thought about time. Before Darwin, people believed the world was created in seven days. After Darwin’s theory was generally accepted, you couldn’t believe that anymore. I did four paintings on the Galápagos, and I’ve done one of Darwin’s garden when he was a child in Shrewsbury, and one of his garden when he was a married man and writing On the Origin of Species in Kent. Those two garden paintings bracket the four paintings from the Galápagos; the six paintings tell the story of Darwin’s life in a pictorial sense. I also have the work I did during the three lockdowns in the UK during COVID-19. We were allowed one hour walk out of our houses each day. I went out every day with a little notebook and sketchbook and made notes about just one thing that I saw that interested me. Then I put them all together. They’re about anything at all. They could be about a snail crawling across the path, or a little landscape, or distant clouds, or a tree that I like, or just anything I noticed. The first lockdown was Wringford, Cornwall is the location of Foster’s sweet chestnut tree painting site, November 2020. LEFT Tony Foster, A Year in the Life of a Cornish Hedge · Spring, 2017 (detail, pp. 52–53) 56 days, the second was 28 days, and the third one was 72 days. So I’ve got 156 little studies. That’s a part of human time that we will never forget. It was the most extraordinary experience in lots of people’s lives, and I think it altered the way we think about time too. And then Castle Dore, which is just up the road from my home, is reputed to be the castle of King Mark and Tristan and Iseult. They did an archaeological dig there, and it’s in fact an Iron Age earthwork. I went up there on the summer solstice and painted the view, painted the sun coming out at 4:23 a.m. or whatever time it was in the morning and then on the winter solstice when it was 8:25 a.m. And so I’ve put those two paintings together because I thought in the Iron Age, that’s how they would have measured time, by the solstices. So that’s a way of demonstrating human time. 19
